Staff Kills: Kayley’s Top 5 Films That Defined Her Childhood
by Kayley Viteo
Everyone has movies from their childhood that for whatever reason stay with them for the rest of their lives. During the day, I spent my childhood much like any other “normal” girl, which basically boiled down to watching Disney animation and any sort of animal movie I could get my hands on. At night, however, I frequently snuck downstairs for horror movies. This edition of Staff Kills is in honor of those midnight viewings – my pick of five horror films that defined my childhood. They are by no means the best horror films, or even the ones I watch the most today. However, they are, without a doubt, the movies I couldn’t get enough of as a kid.
Scream
I first saw Scream the year after it came out (I was 12), a fact which bears repeating because this was the first time I was seeing something so close to its release date. My previous experience with horror films had been whatever I could sneak on late television or rent at a friend’s house. School was out for the summer and I conned my brother into taking advantage of pay-per-view television with me (without our parents’ knowledge). Simply put: it was the first movie in awhile to genuinely scare me. The opening scene still stands as one of my favorite sequences to this day – I had a high appreciation of gore and thus took no small amount of pleasure at slumber parties that later played this by pausing the guts and chair scene to cause general chaos. By this time in my life, I’d had a steady diet of old-school slasher films to understand its satirical nature, so I appreciated how clever it was while still finding it to be genuinely entertaining. Scream defined my childhood simply because much like it revitalized the overall genre at the time, it took my interest in the genre itself and twisted it into something even bigger and better than it was before.
Motel Hell
With horror comedies, you often see/hear the tagline of “You might just die … laughing!” Motel Hell was the first horror comedy – and really the first comedy, period – where my response felt even remotely close to that. There are so many moments in this movie that are laugh-out-loud funny. My mother caught me watching this once and there’s not much you can say to defend yourself when behind you two people with pig heads are fighting each other wildly with chainsaws. She made me turn it off, but I neglected to inform her this was the fifth time I had seen it. There are some things a mother doesn’t need to know about her 11-year old daughter.
Creepshow
Of all the films on this list, Creepshow is the one I’ve seen the most. When I was 9, my parents moved us to a new house with satellite television, which multiplied exponentially the amount of horror films I managed to see in any given year. Creepshow was one of the most oft-played films for some reason, and anytime this was on I had to sit down and watch it. It was my first real taste of horror-comedy, although I’m still not sure why this film amused me so much, especially since I don’t like every story in this anthology. I wager it has something to do with it being my version of a way to cleanse my horror palate – even as a kid, I gravitated towards the more brutal films with a character-driven narrative. I watched films like Creepshow and Motel Hell as a way to come down off that high, so to speak. That being said, credit must be given where credit is due – Creepshow is fantastically written, featuring a spectacular blend of humor and violence that ultimately achieves a type of film that I think many genre fans look at with affection. My favorite portions of the anthology are “The Crate” and “Something to Tide You Over,” although it is the famous cockroach scene in “They’re Creeping Up On You!” that still lingers in the back of my mind whenever I encounter an insect.
The Silence of the Lambs
This movie I know for damn sure I saw when I was too young… honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever be old enough to watch this movie without my skin crawling and my adrenaline pumping. If Michael Myers was what gave me nightmares from age 9-11, Hannibal Lecter took his place from then until … now. Admittedly, the first time I saw this movie I didn’t quite understand or realize the full magnitude of its horror. Shortly afterward I watched it again and at that point, I started testing my limits as a genre fan. I had seen enough horror movies by this point that I was unconsciously categorizing them: which movies could I watch alone with the lights off, and which ones couldn’t I? I made it through Silence of the Lambs by myself with the lights off (something I consider a notable achievement), and consequently lived with nightmares for weeks afterwards. To this day, I have to mentally gear myself up for the scene where Lecter escapes, which absolutely terrifies me. And while I know I can watch it with the lights off, I still don’t like to.
Halloween
Although I’ve spoken of my admittedly rather insane love for this movie all over Brutal as Hell, I’d be remiss to not put it on this list. It is the first horror movie I can ever remember seeing, the one that had me absolutely hooked into the genre from the start. This is a movie that I probably say too young (I was nine), but what I experienced ended up defining what scares me the most to this very day. Even now, what scares me the most is looking outside a window and seeing someone standing still – so still you know something isn’t right. This movie has everything I want in a horror film; a terrifying premise, characters that actually make you emotionally invested, a musical score that sticks in your head for the rest of your life, and a lead character that is beautiful, smart and realistic. Though I didn’t know that this had everything I wanted at the time, I certainly know it now and it remains one of my favorite movies. For most other kids, seeing something so scary would have turned them off of scary movies. Strangely, it had the opposite effect on me – once those credits rolled, I wanted more … and that feeling has never gone away.
